Ukraine’s first heart transplant to child: Doctors report success

In Lviv, for the first time in Ukraine, doctors successfully performed a heart transplant surgery on a 13-year-old boy.

That's according to the chief of the Lviv Ambulance Clinical Hospital, Oleg Samchuk, who broke the news via Facebook, Ukrinform reports.

"We did it!" Samchuk wrote in an emotional post.

"The heart was transplanted to a 13-year-old boy from Volyn's village of Zarudtsi. He has been sick since July. Over the last month, the child remained in the Volyn regional hospital's intensive care unit, and for the last two weeks he was here with us," Samchuk added.

He stressed that the boy's condition had become critical so he desperately needed a new heart to stay alive.

"The organ was transplanted by Boris Todurov, along with Havryl Kovtun and the child's doctor Vitaly Petrov," the hospital chief said.

Also, a Lviv resident, 56, underwent a lung transplant. According to the health official, the man had chronic lung disease for more than ten years, of which the last four he mostly spent in his apartment, being oxygen dependent. Without new lungs, he had months left to live. The transplant was performed by Ukrainian cardiac surgeons Ihor Humenny, Roman Domashych, and thoracic surgeon Yuriy Korol, with the assistance of Polish colleagues.

"This is another huge step towards transplant independence. Our citizens now don't have to travel abroad for such treatment as it's already available in Ukraine. Now we need to make sure there are hundreds of such surgeries a year, and every Ukrainian who needs a donor's organ, received it," summed up Samchuk.